I use the calendar picker from YUI, and the dynamic charts (line, pie charts)
from g-charts.I have to say both are very easy to use, although you would
have to be proabbly cache the google charts because there is a daily 50k limit.

Here is a snippet:

 

Check out my new site: http://www.mehtrix.com/ 

It still has a bunch of features that are missing, but I am adding them
as time permits...

Currently I have the facebook crap meter running :), the xbox live graphs
will be added shortly.

What is it? 

Mehtrix is derived from "metrics".

"Metrics are a system of parameters or ways of quantitative and
periodic assessment of a process that is to be measured, along
with the procedures to carry out such measurement and the procedures
for the interpretation of the assessment in the light of previous or
comparable assessments. Metrics are usually specialized by the
subject area, in which case they are valid only within a certain domain
and cannot be directly benchmarked or interpreted outside it."

The idea is to get,capture and analyze metrics of stuff that is
relevant to my interest at any given time, and help draw the bigger
picture for people with similar interests.

I was at Facebook Developer Garage event at MIT last night, just to check out what
was new, at what to expect in the roadmap.

As you know Facebook had recently launced "The Platfrom" , which
is a open developer framework for the community for developers to
make apps internal, extrernal around facebook.

Although this is a great idea in essence, we all know what happened
in the aftermath of the launch:

    - Flying zombies apps, cheap tequila shot apps, and etc..
    - Tons and tons of notifications.
    - People sending stuff, but to be able to see you have to add the app.

Eventually peoples profiles started to look like a kindergarden play room with
many colorfull toys, squeky stuff.

This was great, but the problem is we do not go to kindergarden anymore! :)

Wasn't there any usefull tools? Yes, but they have been over shadowed with
the junk.

One of the slides in the presentation mentioned that, there
where 7000+ apps today, and 100+ apps added daily, how many of
these could be uniq, and usefull?

How will Facebook make sure that there system does not end up
like the Myspace junk yard?

These where the questions I was able to ask Sandra Liu Huang, who was
representing facebook.

She told me that this is in the top list of the items, concerns they have
and they want to be able to make sure the uniqiness and quality
of the apps is at a certain level, but without policing each and every app.

But HOW?

Time shall show if this is possible :)
 

Hi,

Thanks to  Todd I have learned that it looks like XBOX live status page will no longer be available.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/14/lawsuit-forces-microsoft-to-stay-mum-about-xbox-live-status/

First of all, I think 3 guys in Texas apparently do not have anything else to do then to
clog the legal system with a useless law suit, but thats a total diffrent story. (!)

This means that the TODAY.PNG that was the daily graph of up/down time will no
longer be relevant, I suggest not using it until the status page is updated
in the future.

 
He is a male 8 month old tuxedo cat. He allows us to live with him, and
we are very gratefull for that, what would we do living on the streets eating
trash.

This video shows is EXACTLY what he does:

Some of the (I guess common for kittens) things Kofte likes to do
between 4am -> 8am in order:

1- Come up really close to owners face and smell, lick nose.
2- If owner does not wake up, try catching toes from on top of blanket.
3- If still owner snoring, get under blanket and attack feet.
4- If owner pushes of bed, repeats step #3 couple more times.
5- If still no progress, go to living room, and run as fast as you can
    and jump on the bed, and pounce on owners head.
6- If kicked out of bedroom, cry, miaw, scratch door until allowed back in.

Meet KittenTerminatior 2000(actual name Roboquad):

This is the recipe for a good old nice sleep till 8am:
1- If kitten is acting kuku, put kitten outside the bedroom.
2- Turn on KittenTerminatior, and set it to Guard mode.
3- Put robot outside, right infront of the bedroom door(where usually the scratching
and crying happens)

As little devil approaches the door to cry, and scratch, the bot will
notice the cat, and move like suprised, and make sounds, this is more
then enough to have the cat go inside to another room safe away from the
scary moving object :)

When you wake up in the morning, you will see the cat looking out the window,
lounging on the couch, or just napping away while you had just enjoyed a normal
morning.

So, I guess WowWee finally did do something usefull for humanity!

01/11/2008:

01/12/2008:

This can be mean and/or two things:

1- It is getting a bit better.
2- Or, because people had so many issues, they are not signin lately as they used to.


Either case, I had no issues in the last couple days my self, so I can't complain to much right now, finger crossed ofcourse.

It would be interesting to see how this weekend pulls off...

Last night(1/6/2008) xbox live had more hickups: 

http://www.acddv.com/xlive/2008-01-06.PNG:

(The image looks squished because of the blog format) 

Also, I did get some comments on having the date, time included in graph
images, which I will be working on.

But for accessing the current day, times(10 minute latency) graph you
can always reach if from here:

http://www.acddv.com/xlive/today.PNG 

XBOX live had a horrible night again yesterday until 00:30 early this morning.

Since I started to capture daily statistics(every 10 minutes) I have seen this pattern of
XBOX live not being able to handle the load usually East Coast time night hours(US).
I guess thats when a big population of people in the East Coast decides to go "Live"
and gets dissapointed(Just like me last night!)

Check these out,

01/04/2008:



01/05/2008:

 
You can aslo check current days graph that gets update every 10 minutes:
http://www.acddv.com/xlive/today.PNG

These statistics are avaialable publicly, check this thread on how you can use them:
http://acddv.com/blog/2008/01/is_xboxlive_really_that_live.html

 Blue tickers are when everything "up and running", while red tickers are for any sort
of issues.

These graphs are really handy on giving the idea of the health, and the big picture
of how "live" xbox is.

 I also made these statistical images available to the public. Feel free to use them, just
mention that you got them from me.

For current day's image(which gets update eveyr 10 minutes) you just need to point to:
http://www.acddv.com/xlive/today.PNG 

(so you can point to TODAY, and it will always get updated) 

TODAY:

 

For previous dates, you can point to for example:
http://www.acddv.com/xlive/2008-01-04.PNG

Once this thing runs for a month, I will also generate monthly statistics. 

Feel free to drop in any suggestions.

I wanted to get away for a bit with the computer vision work I am doing for my home brewed robot, and try some things that I had in the corner of my mind recently.

One of these things was to see the suggested distance diffrences between google maps, and yahoo maps. Which service is more efficient, and which can suggest the shortest routes?

For this, all I need was a set of addresses I can use for the test, and luckly t-Mobile hotspot finder
has many addresses per state that I could use: t-mobile store locations

I specifcly picked NY, because the search can be done per state, and that is the one with the most locations for this test.

Next, I needed a script to parse out the addresses from that site, and create"From" and "To" objects
which I can pass to the google, yahoo http requests and parse out the total distance between trips.

What better tool can be their for such a script then to use python, and beautiful soup which is a excelent html parser, just what I need.

My test script's source code is here 

I picked 220 addresses from NY T-Mobile store list, and created 110 route's, which I was able to use with :

    -googleQuery = "http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=from:"+From+"+to:"+To
    -yahooQuery = "http://maps.yahoo.com/dd_result?newaddr="+From+"&taddr="+To

Yahoo, recenlty changed its maps layout with Ajax, but luckly I can still use the old version as in the example above

After parsing each distance for yahoo, and google for the 110 route's and adding them together; the result I got was quite interesting:

Total distance for 110 route's for:
    -    google maps : 4138.9 miles
    -    yahoo maps  : 4203.2 miles

So, in overall for google was able to suggest the shortest path for this test array.

I also tried a couple other states for this test, and the outcome was similar in overall.

The basic idea which I will follow is to have have the webcam take snapshot of frames every defined T period, and use a class to analyze these two frames.

This class will be used to find and figure out the location of a new object that exist in frame1 , but which did not exits on frame0. The location is based on either if the object is found on the left, right, middle section of the image.

This will enable me to send commands to the servo to have the webcam which it is carrying ontop of it to turn towards the newly identified moving object.

Here are some examples using this class on a test app:

So I was thinking of my first project idea, and decided to divide my projects into phases.
This way as I outline and develope the phases, it will be easier for me to manage, and document
them as well and use these components in diffrent projects down the road.

After thoughtfull consideration, I planned to make a moving web-cam, which will detect motion and turn in that direction. The hardware part of this project is fairly simple, although software part will be the challenge, hence I plan to use my own custom motion detection algorithm based on common algorithms out there.

The ingridients I plan are these:

1- VISTA Ultimate
2- Visual Studio Express 2005, C#
3- A cheap USB webcam
4- Phidget Intergace kit 8/8/8
5- Phidget 4 servo controller
6- 1 HiTec 422 Analog Servo

The basic plan is to assemble the webcam on top of the servo, and write a simple
C# form, which will take snapshots from the webcam every second, and compare pixel
colour changes with the previous snapshot, and if it sees a change of pixels defined by
a threshold change the position of the servo in that direction.

The challenge is, as the camera moves towards that direction, the next snapshot will show
that object move to the opposite direction, hence the view angle has changed, and will cause
the camera move towards that direction. So i need to come up with a algorithm to lock the
snapshot and motion detection logic while the camera/servo is moving.

Also, if I take a blurry snapshot while the camera is moving the pixels will have to much noise, hence we now how webcam is not so great with moving objects.

So for the first part of this experiment, I need to start working on the webcam C# interaction, there is many examples out there, so it should be easy...I'll keep you guys posted.

So, after getting my 8/8/8 interface kit, which has:

    -8 analog inputs
    -8 digital inputs
    -8 digital outputs
    -2 port USB hub

I had also got a analog force sensor, so my first experiement was to use the C# API
to get some readings from the force sensor.

My setup was this:

    - VISTA Ultimate
    - Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Express

My main problem was that the API documentation has a section for each analog sensor
except for the force sensor, but luckly every analog phidget device has a interface by default for
get { } , set { } methods, that way I was able to get some raw readings from the sensor.

But, I am not sure how that raw reading would correspond in weight terms. The force sensor
has a default no force 0, and high 1000 int value that can be read, but I am not sure how
to translate that int value to grams.

One experiment I did was to setup the force sensor so that it could balance perfectly with a object on top of it. When I put the object on it, the first reading was 490, but it started to increase gradually, I would say every 5 seconds +10 value, it went up to 580 where it slowed down. So something tells me getting a full stable reading with this sensor might be a little fishy. But I plan
to do some more tests on that...